5.4 WeakAuras Strings

Patch 5.4 is here, and that means it’s time for a WeakAuras update. The first and perhaps most important piece of news is that WeakAuras has moved. The original author quit updating it two years ago, and Stanzilla has been generously maintaining it for the community. He’s decided to move the project to WeakAuras 2 from this point forward. The good news is that you won’t need to change anything; WeakAuras 2 uses the same folder structure and files as WeakAuras, so updating to WeakAuras 2 is as simple as downloading and extracting, just like you would for any other new version of WeakAuras.

Special note if you’re using Curse Client: You’ll want to add WeakAuras 2 to your addon list and uninstall the old WeakAuras, which will no longer be updated. Make sure you uncheck the “Also delete the in-game settings for this addon” box when removing WeakAuras. If you leave that box checked when uninstalling, Curse Client will remove your existing WeakAuras setup and you’ll have to start from scratch!

Paladin

The basic layout of my Paladin setup hasn’t changed much at all since 5.3. However, there is one new element I’m toying with. A Youtube user messaged me to ask if there was any way I could construct a WeakAura element they saw elsewhere:

The weakaura in question is something I saw on Riggnaros’s stream over at http://www.twitch.tv/riggnarosbl/b/434932264 – you’ll find it at the bottom of his UI to the right of his action bars. It appears to be a WeakAura group consisting of 3 progress bars. The top bar displays his current vengeance, the 2nd bar displays the current vengeance of his other tank, and the final bar shows how much vengeance would be gained by the other tank if he was to taunt.

For reference, this is the UI element he’s talking about.

Riggnaros’ Vengeance Montior Aura

And when there’s a Vengeance gain to be had by taunting, it looks like this:

Riggnaros’ Vengeance Monitor. Again.

It also seems as if he’s got it color-coded. In the above screenshot, Rigg would gain Vengeance by taunting off of Absalom. But in this one, Absalom would gain Vengeance by taunting off of Rigg:

Riggnaros’ Vengeance Monitor, bugged.

The third bar that the Youtube user described is actually just another bar for Absallom, Absalom’s alt tank:

Would the real Absalom please stand up…

In other words, the bars for the off-tanks are probably hard-coded to the player’s name, hence why he has one for each tank he frequently plays with. It also seems sort of glitchy, in that it shows up midway through their Council of Elders kill, so the triggering may be a little funky.

Trying to replicate this in WeakAuras is not too difficult, but does require a lot of custom lua code. We need to create a progress bar of “Custom” type and write custom lua functions to handle the triggering and untriggering (i.e. display/hide) as well as to set the length of the bar and the text showing the player’s name and the AP gain. The difficulty is compounded slightly by a bug in WeakAuras that I stumbled across and subsequently fixed.

If doing all that yourself sounds like a tall order, you’re in luck. Here’s my version: WeakAuras Vengeance Bars. I’ve taken a slightly different approach than Rigg has.

The bar for your own Vengeance is more or less identical to what he has. It shows your name on the left and the numerical value of Vengeance on the right. I’ve taken the liberty of converting the text to pretty-print format (i.e. converting 10000 to 10k) to make it easier to read at a glance.

However, rather than capping it at a fixed 300k as Rigg has, I’ve set it up to dynamically adjust in discrete steps based on your current Vengeance. In other words, if your Vengeance is less than 80k, it will set the bar’s maximum at 100k. If you exceed 80k, it will reset the maximum to 200k, and so on in 100k increments. Every time you exceed 80% of the maximum, it will reconfigure the maximum. It’s also got a 15-second decay timer on that functionality, so that it won’t twitch spasmodically when you’re near a threshold.

The bar for your co-tank’s Vengeance is a little more versatile than Rigg’s. First, it’s coded to use target-of-target, so that it will automatically adjust to whoever currently has aggro. That way, you don’t need to hard-code a name in there. And it will automatically hide if the boss has no target or is targeting you.

The downside, of course, is that you can’t see the other tank’s Vengeance level when they don’t have aggro. But since you can’t get any Vengeance by taunting when the boss isn’t targeting that tank, that’s mostly irrelevant for the majority of players.

Since some players might like to monitor their co-tank’s Vengeance, there’s also a third bar for that. However, it’s hardcoded to the name of my co-tank (Agwyne). To change it, go to the “Off-Tank Vengeance” aura, choose the Display tab, and click on the “Expand Text Editor” button next to “Custom function.” In the editor that pops up, you’ll need to change the following line:

THECK_VBAR_OTNAME = “Agwyne”

Change “Agwyne” to “YourOffTanksName” and it should automatically display your off-tank’s name and Vengeance values for this bar.

The text editor button used to change the name of the tank used for the “Off-tank Vengeance” bar.

I should note that all three of the bars automatically adjust size together, so that you can always make at-a-glance comparisons between them.

On the target-of-target bar, text showing the potential gain you stand to receive by taunting shows up when there is a gain to be had. In other words, if you won’t gain any Vengeance by taunting, it will just show the target-of-target’s name. If you can gain Vengeance, it’ll show “(+X AP from Taunt)” after the name. It won’t ever show you when another tank will gain Vengeance by taunting off of you, since that’s not something you can control anyway.

Finally, there’s another set of green underlay/overlay bars on top of your bar to tell you the Vengeance level at which your current Sacred Shield or Eternal Flame was cast. If you’re at higher AP than you were when you last cast SS/EF, the green bar will be shorter than your (red) Vengeance bar, and the text will also tell you the potential AP gain in a similar fashion to the Vengeance gain (“+X AP for SS”). If you’re at lower AP than when you last cast SS, the green bar will be in the background so you can see that fact visually. Since all of these bars are fairly complicated, and not everyone will want the SS/EF overlays (most other tanks wouldn’t use them), I’ve split them off into a separate group: SS/EF Vengeance Bar Overlays

Here’s a video of it in action with Sacred Shield:

I’ve also updated the older text auras that display Vengeance and SS information to include Eternal Flame, since there’s a good chance we’ll be using it in 5.4. There’s now indicators that tells you how many HP you spent on your last Eternal Flame and how many Bastion of Glory stacks were consumed in addition to the usual Vengeance and Haste indicators. That group can be found here: Vengeance / SS / EF text indicators.

Here’s another video showing the Eternal Flame indicators:

Note that I have them set up to load only for Protection Paladins at the moment (easier for testing), so if you play another class you’ll need to change the Load conditions. If you play multiple tanking classes, I suggest using the bottom condition for dungeon role, though this means they won’t load when you’re soloing.

While you won’t see them in either of those videos, I’ve also added greyed-out SS and EF indicators for when you’ve cast the buff on other players (for example, if you put SS on your co-tank while you’re off-tanking). You’ll have to go in and change the name of the player it’s checking to your off-tank’s name for them to work, but they use standard WeakAuras triggers so there’s no coding required. Just find the appropriate aura (“Sacred Shield On Off-Tank” or “Eternal Flame Duration On Off-Tank“), go to the Trigger tab, and change the “Specific Unit” name from “Agwyne” to your off-tank’s name.

Mage

The other notable change is that I’ve been playing my Frost mage a lot since 5.3, so I’ve got a fully-functional Frost Mage aura set now. It shows icons for Frozen Orb, Frostfire Bolt, Ice Lance (along with Fingers of Frost charges and your Water Elemental’s Freeze availability), and of course Frostbolt as a GCD monitor. It’s also got cooldown icons for Evocation, Invocation, Alter Time, and Time Warp, and icons to warn you of the absence of Arcane Intellect, Water Elemental, and Mana Gems. I’ve also updated the “Mage – Any” profile to level 90, though the Fire and Arcane setups are still the old level-85 versions.

All Classes

Rather than continually re-posting links to all of my auras in every update, which then requires that I update forwarding links on various sites, I’ve decided to work smarter and not harder. The links to all of my WeakAuras strings for all of the classes that I play can now be found at this address:

Since the links to pastebin are static, the links on that page will automatically reflect any changes I make to the auras on pastebin. I’ll generally update them incrementally as I level or play new classes.

55 Responses to 5.4 WeakAuras Strings

It doesn’t look like the pastebins have a description for what that class’ auras actually do (besides the recent pally tank ones, that is). Would you be able to provide a quick rundown of those so I can see if I want to try them out? Or is their function obvious upon importing them?

Secondly, do you happen to know if any of these work with either Power Auras Classic (4.x), or the beta version update (5.x) that came out last year? If not, do you think it would be possible to transcribe the LUA for each aura?

For the most part, each class’ auras provide the base rotation for that class/spec along with major spec-specific cooldowns. The “Class – Any” set usually includes the major cooldowns that all specs of that class get.

Since each set imports as a group in WeakAuras, and doesn’t mess with your existing ones, it’s relatively easy to just import a set, move it off into a corner of the screen, and see what it does as you attack a dummy. If you don’t like it, just delete the group and all children and it’s gone.

I have no idea if they work with any version of PowerAuras, but I suspect not. Since most of the auras are just built out of basic WeakAuras triggers, it would be prohibitively time-consuming to try and write LUA equivalents for each one. Sorry.

If you mean the text auras, Green generally means “the current buff is OK/optimal.” Red means that the current buff is less effective than it could be – either cast at lower AP/Haste than you current level, or with fewer than 3 Holy Power or less than 4 BoG stacks.

My question is how to get the 3 “Text Helper…” to display (on german game settings) coz it wont display anything while in fight. ? Some clue where to search or what to change to get it to work ? Allother WA strings work and display in the right way while infight.

“Spellname in WA is changed to german the custom txt “vengeance” is changed to “Rache” .. but still no display or work of this while in fight.

The “helper” auras aren’t supposed to display anything, they’re dummy auras that set the global variables I use to track EF/SS cast information. As long as the other auras (BoG, Vengeance, Haste, HP) are showing, it’s working properly.

Secondly I’m having some trouble with the auras display because on the Priority auras it isn’t displayed the actual cooldown of each ability(with a number, I just see the classical visual motion for an ability on cooldown). What can I do in order to fix it?

I use OmniCC for the number overlay. However, if you’d prefer to do that all in WeakAuras, you’ll need to go to each of the “AbilityName CD” auras and change the display text settings from %s to %p (for progress).

I have a problem with your EF bars overlay.
I understand how it is supposed to work, but actually it doesn’t.

I absolutely always have a red bar (which I assume is the current vengeance bar from the vengeance bars itself, not from the EF overlay), and regardless of my vengeance level and regardless whether I have an EF running or not, I never get a green bar and it absolutely always says (for example) “+38k AP on EF”, even if I just have used a 5BoG3HP EF.

Plus, I don’t have those HP/BoG indicators which are shown on your video. Even when I only have the options of WA open, the place where I assume they should be, it only shows a yellow questionmark. I am quite confused.

Do you have any idea what is going wrong? I use WA2, so this should normally be not the cause…

When you first log in, if you open WA2 and click on the “Vengeance, SS, EF Texts” group, it should display red zeros for everything (0BoG 0HP 0% 0(0)). There are also three yellow question marks to the left of that, you can ignore those.

If you don’t have that group, then you need to import them (http://pastebin.com/3c6R4WxR); the Text auras are separate from the Vengeance Bar auras.

Similarly, to get the green EF/SS Bar overlays, you need to import that group (http://pastebin.com/b3jTPGBC). It’s also separate from the base Vengeance Bar group, partly because of limitations on the import string length and partly because not all tanking classes want EF/SS overlays. Though if you’re getting the “+38k AP on EF” text, it *should* be installed already…

I’m unable to replicate the behavior of your SS overlay bar, it works fine for me. Are you using a non-English client? If so maybe you need to change the spell name in the SS/EF Helper auras.

I have importet the ef/ss overlay. and I don’t see the 0BoG 0HP 0% 0(0) you have mentioned. I am using enGB client. this is how WA with options open looks like right now: http://i.imgur.com/lBmw0TP.jpg

I might reinstall WA completely, but I can’t do it now, because we are raiding right now… maybe something was just screwed up with the update from WA to WA2…

Ok the missing SS EF Texts is awkward. but yes, this resolves this problem.
and I have now done a full reinstall including exporting my important strings, completely reinstalling Weakauras and importing the newest strings from pastebin. It does now indeed work. It actually works a little different than I have thought, but I guess I get used to it.

thanks for your help and keep up the good work. while not really mandatory, it drastically eases tanking, at least that’s what my gut tells me.

I seem to be getting an odd error whenever I cast Eternal Flame. I’m getting
Message: [string “return function () …”]:13: attempt to perform arithmetic on global ‘THECK_WA_GLOBAL_HPVAL’ (a nil value)
I thought maybe something had gotten messed up in my import after moving from WA to WA2, so I cleared out all of the imported auras and re-imported them, but that doesn’t seem to have fixed it.

Appreciate your work on the Prot Pally WA ;p. Saved me many hours of muddling around on my own lol. I did get brave and managed to modify your work to suit my layout. Even learned quite a bit about WA in the process. Sometimes it’s just easier for me to ‘disassemble’ something to figure out how it works than to just follow tuturials.

One change I made was to set up a group for what I call my ‘Survival CDs’, Div Prot, Div Shield, Hand of Purity, GoAk, Ard Def & LoH. These are just the icons set to show in combat and only if the ability/spell is available. If it’s on CD the icon is hidden. But there’s just one problem I haven’t figured out…using Div Shield or LoH cause Forebearance which prevents the other ability from being used. I’m wondering if anyone has any thoughts on how to incorporate that so that the icon for whichever hasn’t actually been used will hide for the duration of Forebearance. Basically I use Div Shield so that icon hides for the 5 min CD of the spell and LoH hides for the 1 min duration of Forebearance is what I’m trying to accomplish. Or is it just beyond what WA can handle?

Add a second trigger to the spells affected by Forbearance. In other words, the Lay on Hands icon will have two triggers: a “Spell Cooldown” (inverted, of course) trigger and an “Aura” trigger that looks for Forbearance (also inverted). There will be a check-box at the top of the Triggers pane with a drop-down box to let you choose whether “All” or “Any” triggers need to be satisfied – in this case you want “All.”

Finally had time to fiddle with WA and added the 2nd trigger. Does exactly what I was hoping for. Many thanks ;p. Next time I happen to be running with another pally and they drop LoH on me I’ll know that my DivShield/LoH/HoP won’t be available for self casting before I try to fire them off instead of wondering if my keybind failed lol. I’m frequently surprised by how robust and versatile WA is.

Guess my next project is learnng how Raven works. Been using Satrina Buff Frames for about as long as the addon’s been out but it hasn’t really been updated much since before MoP. Probably best to retire it before it just doesn’t work any more.

Theck, have you tried having an auto-clone aura for vengeance based off your raid status as main tank rather than target of target? Or dungeon role? If you tried this, I don’t want to waste my time fiddling with it.

I haven’t tried it, no. I think you could probably write one that grabs the name automatically though. You’d probably have to cycle through each raid member looking to see if they’re a MTT or Tank role (and of course excluding yourself).

I just have one question, for the “Eternal Flame” on the off-tank indicator.

You say that :
“Just find the appropriate aura (“Sacred Shield On Off-Tank” or “Eternal Flame Duration On Off-Tank“), go to the Trigger tab, and change the “Specific Unit” name from “Agwyne” to your off-tank’s name.”

Just started using your weak aura’s and I like em alot… only issue I’m having is with your Shield of the righteous HP >=5 does not show the icon… all I get is a grey box… I have the display icon showing that it should be Ability_Paladin_ShieldofVengence just like the >=3 aura, but it changes to a grey box as soon as I hit 5 HP

You need to edit some of the lua code in the “TarTar Vengeance” aura. So open WeakAuras and go to that aura.
You’re going to have to change “targettarget” to “focustarget” in several text editor spots.

The first one is in the Display tab, under “Custom Function.” Click on the “Expand Text Editor” button and replace “targettarget” with “focustarget” in the UnitBuff() call; then hit Done.

Next go to the Trigger tab and do the same for each of the code blocks in this section. it appears once each in “Custom Trigger,” “Custom Untrigger,” and “Duration Info,” and twice in “Name Info.”

First of all, thank you for all the hard work you do to help the paladins out there
I’m trying to use the vengeance bar setup, but I can’t seem to change the name of my off tank….when I go in and change THECK_VBAR_OTNAME = “Agwyne” to THECK_VBAR_OTNAME = “my off tank name” I get Theck on the bar and no vengeance numbers ? thx for any help you can give.

Oh, I think I see the problem. Did you test this while in a party with Royaladin? (I’m assuming the answer is no).

The name it displays is dynamic, you can see the code in the Trigger -> Name Info text field. It should look like this:

function()

if not THECK_VBAR_OTNAME then
THECK_VBAR_OTNAME = “Theck”
end

local _,_,_,_,_,_,_,_,_,_,_,_,_,_,value=UnitBuff(“player”, “Vengeance”)
local _,_,_,_,_,_,_,_,_,_,_,_,_,_,value2=UnitBuff(THECK_VBAR_OTNAME, “Vengeance”)
if not value then
value = 0
end
if not value2 then
value2 = 0
end

As you can see, if there’s no name set, it defaults the value to Theck. The function you copy/pasted is on the Display tab, and doesn’t get run until the first time the aura is displayed (i.e. in actual combat, not just when you show it in the WA2 setup window). So it’ll show up as “Theck” until you actually enter combat, at which point it *should* change to Royaladin.

I got the same error with your aura, but it was just an odd copy/paste issue with one of the text fields. Fixing that, everything worked fine, but I still had my own auras installed so it’s hard to debug from that.

I exported my own to a string again and updated the pastebin for them. If it’s not too much trouble, delete the old Vengeance Bars group (and its children) and re-import from this: